A Testimony from Sara Light

In Her Words…

I attended the Wonderful Wednesday at which the speaker was the husband of Tracee Laing (Tracee was ill), founder of Healing Arts Missions. He explained that conditions in Haiti are truly awful due to gangs controlling much of the country.  Healing Arts Missions was forced to close its medical clinic and, most recently, suspend all medical services. (They do still support a school and water program.) The doctor who ran the clinic has friends who were kidnapped.  Basic services and food are scarce.  Hearing all of this, my heart went out to the people of Haiti.

A couple of weeks later, I was reading the newspaper (Luddite that I am) and saw an article on displaced residents of an apartment complex in Columbus.  The complex had been closed due to unsafe and unhealthy living conditions.  The article said that many of the displaced residents were Haitian immigrants and that many of them had come to this country through a trafficker who lied to them and swindled them.  Had I read the article earlier, I would have thought “How could they be so stupid?”  But after the Wonderful Wednesday presentation, I realized that these folks may have been in a situation where they were desperate to get out of Haiti- that anything might seem better. 

We at the church were invited to show up for the people of Haiti by coming to the presentation and learning about their conditions.  At the time, I thought,  “That isn’t doing much”, but I was wrong.  It made me “think” differently. It changed my understanding and opened my heart to their plight.